just you listen!

It’s Christmas-time, again.

Yes, it comes every year. I know. The day that celebrates the birth of someone who probably was not born on that day, but who would eventually grow up to be someone who may or may not be the messiah of a people in Israel. Christmas. Yay.

I have a black Santa hat with Bah Humbug written on it.

Christmas seems to be a time where normal taste is abandoned. Why would you eat Turkey? It’s like chicken. But worse. And bigger. And worse. And you want to eat it with jam? Decorations, too. Let’s simply forget taste, decency, and good sense, and just cover everything with something sparkly. Including the radiators. You cannot have dull radiators.

Ok, I’m being negative for effect. I love Christmas. I love spending time with my lovely (cough) family, I love the smell of the decorations, of cinnamon and orange, of mincemeat. I even love the pappy decorations. Yay! But I reserve the right to get Scroogish whenever the mood takes me. Fuck tinsel.

There is one area which holds strange wonder for me though. The Christmas song. There is of course the rubbish you simply have to listen to every year, without exception. Wham, Slade, Wizzard…As well as “classics”, like “Santa Baby” and just about anything by Bing Crosby ever. As far as I can tell, nobody likes them, but we still inflict them upon ourselves year after year, in some sort of masochistic Sisyphean cycle. In addition there are the new songs. These come broadly into 3 categories. The anti-Christmas song, which tries to be rebellious through utter grinding misery but so many people have done it already it has become part of the tradition anyway. Like ironic hats. The really, jolly, damn-I’m-going-to-be-merry ones, with bells and swelling strings and lyrics about “Christmas cheer” and awful, awful videos. And then there are the ones which are just songs. Boring, normal songs that happen to be about Christmas. No!

Two stand out Christmas songs for me though, are the Maccabees’ version of “Walking in the air”, and Blink 182’s “Happy Holidays, you bastard”. The Maccabees’ version is haunting, beautiful, and fills you with a sense of awe usually reserved for classical music and Arcade Fire. Blink’s is notable simply for how unchristmassy it is: “Christmas eve and I’ve only bought 2 fucking presents…I hate, hate, hate your guts, and I’ll never talk to you again unless your dad will suck me off…ejaculate into a sock”

Charming, guys. They don’t even try to justify it. They just leave it there right in the middle of Take Off Your Pants And Jacket. Classic.